


turn on the bright lights

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Star Gazing, Time Skips, projecting onto davekat is something that can be so personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26891476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: You’re not sure at what point these things stop feeling like traps. You’re not sure at what point you stop falling for them, either. Clearly, though, tonight isn’t it.Still. It’s nice.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 76





	turn on the bright lights

**Author's Note:**

> u all know the drill another dawn another dave fic bc im mental Ermm title is from nyc by interpol sooooo soososo so sooo dave song please listen @_@ um hope u all enjoy!! also follow my twitter @candydavekat if u feel so inclined..

The desert is colder than you’d expect. 

Granted, the majority of your time is spent between the four walls of your bedroom, sometimes extending out to the linoleum paneling of the kitchen or the searing concrete and gravel of the roof deck, but the few times you’d been able to venture past the confines of Houston and into the desert miles outside of the city confines, you’d only done so during the day. Then, it had been hot as fucking balls, enough to make you sweaty and dizzy and worn out even after only a handful of minutes. The heat out here is different than it is back at your apartment; whereas the latter is heavy and permeating in a way you can get used to after a while—or ignore, if you try hard enough—this is searing in a way that slaps you in the face, leaves your head swimming and your skin crawling.

You hate the heat. It’s just one of those things you think you’re never going to be able to learn the language to adequately describe how much you fucking hate it.

Except right now, it’s not hot. It’s actually kind of cold, really. You have a sneaking suspicion this is due to the fact that it’s literally three o’clock in the fucking morning right now. At least you think it might be. Given the number of times Bro had to pull the car over to bang around under the hood, spitting out the occasional  _ motherfuckin’ piece of shit _ under his breath, you’re sort of inclined to think the analog clock attached to the dashboard of the car is a little faulty, too.

Whatever. Point is, it’s the middle of the fucking morning, and you’re kind of freezing your ass off here, standing in the center of a patch of brush, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of your hoodie. It’s the only one you own—because, seriously, when are you ever going to need a hoodie when you’re living in some shit-ass apartment in the middle of Houston that hasn’t had working air conditioner since the coming of Christ?—and it’s so thin you might as well just be wearing a t-shirt, but whatever. Really. You’ve dealt with worse, and even if you hadn’t— what a fucking life that would be, you can’t help but think, and it makes you smile a lot less than you wish it did—you certainly have worse to deal with right now.

Worse being Bro. Because when isn’t that the case, really?

Okay, to his credit, he’s been something verging on normal. Well, normal for other people, which you’re pretty sure qualifies as verifiably off-the-charts insane for him. But you take what you can get with him, and what you’re getting right now is him honestly being kind of chill. Not empty, not impassive, not block-of-ice cold, but chill. He even let you choose the music driving out here without arching any eyebrows or twitching his lips in a way that you’ve come to lean mean he’s plotting out the fastest route to Dave Strider Ultimate Beatdown Town behind those stupid shades of his—hell, he let you drive out here with him in the first place, an event in itself which is so monumental you’re pretty sure historians a hundred years from now are going to be pissing themselves at the mere mention of this event. You don’t really know where he goes when he leaves the apartment—  _ work, little man _ , he’ll say on the handful of occasions you grow enough of a pair to ask him,  _ your bro’s gotta work. _ Like that’s a helpful response—but you do know with near-total certainty that you are definitely not allowed to come with. You're not even allowed to ask to come with. You know this because you did once. It went over about as poorly as you expected. 

Not that it matters. Your nose healed just fine, and it’s not like you give a shit where he goes when he leaves, anyways. Whatever gets him away from the landing outside your bedroom door and out of the house. 

But tonight, for whatever reason, you had been sprawled out across your bed, half-sleeping, half-trying to summon the energy to sit up and get to work with cranking out the next update for SBaHJ when he had appeared in your doorway, arms folded, mouth worked into its customary hard line, and asked if you wanted to drive out to the desert with him. 

“Huh?” you had said. And then you had mentally thrown yourself down a flight of stairs—just to save him the trouble of doing it later, really. If there’s one bullet point on your shockingly short list of shit you actually know about the dude you’ve been bunking with for the past twelve years, it’s that he hates getting asked questions.  _ Makes you sound like a fuckin’ moron,  _ he had told you once in a moment of rare expressiveness.  _ You don’t get it, you don’t get it. Don’t make it my problem. _

Lo and fucking behold, though, the miracles continued. Bro hadn’t even batted an eye. Not that he usually does, but—you know. He had just stayed propped up against your doorframe, the light from your bedside lamp throwing his face into dull relief. 

“Do you wanna go for a ride?” he repeated after a second.

“Why?” Wow. Two-for-fucking-two with the stupid questions. You really don’t make things easy for yourself, do you?

Still, he had just stood there, face wiped blank. “Yes or no. Not asking again.”

You had leaned back into your pillow for a second, feeling oddly as if you were deliberating on something a lot more than a simple trip out of the apartment. Then, “Okay. Okay, sure.”

Because what the hell, really?

The drive had been quiet, but that was nothing new. Well, it was, sort of, mostly just because it was going so well, weirdly enough. Bro hadn’t even threatened to flip your car on top of the guy who cut the two of you off as you merged onto the freeway. Completely unprecedented on all fronts. Even now, as you stand in the middle of the desert, hands stuffed deep into your pocket, one eye trained vaguely on Bro across the clearing, you still find yourself reeling a little. 

You’re not sure at what point these things stop feeling like traps. You’re not sure at what point you stop falling for them, either. Clearly, though, tonight isn’t it. 

Still. It’s nice. 

It’s weird, too. It’s weird in a way that you don’t know how to parse, like there’s a knot of yarn building in the center of your chest faster than you can untangle it, so you just don’t. It’s not worth it, you figure, whatever it is supposed to be. 

Somewhere in the distance, Rose Lalonde breaks into a smirk at your latest usage of a knitting-themed metaphor. Then she gives you a look—a Look, really, the one that somehow manages to say  _ Dave  _ in that obnoxiously all-knowing tone of voice she sometimes uses without her even having to open her mouth. You mentally flip her off, dig your heels into the dirt around you, and turn to watch Bro. 

He’s standing by the front of the car, propped up against the side door, face tilted up to the sky. In the moonlight, he glows almost translucent, the lines of his jaw and neck cutting deep shadows across his skin. He looks like a statue, a marble sculpture, something out of the storage room of a museum. Impressive in a way that feels that special sort of removed, the kind that makes your chest ache for a second. He feels a million miles and just as many years away, and at the same time he feels right there, a needle forever pressing at the edge of your personal space bubble, and you’re honestly not sure which perspective you hate more. 

You almost feel like there’s a cordon or a reel of caution tape separating him from you—now more so than ever, because it’s always there, isn’t it?—and even just looking in his general direction makes the base of your neck prickle. Like you’re breaking the rules. Like you’re doing something wrong. 

Like you’re asking for it, in a way, and how dumb is that, really? 

You watch him take a breath, hold it, shoulders raised to his ears, and then let it out in a sharp burst. In the thick silence of the space around you, the sound is almost deafening. You feel it echo through you, vibrating around the inside of your skull for a second. Then, with a twitch of his head in your general direction, Bro speaks. 

“Come here.”

It takes you a second to realize he’s talking to you—as if there was anyone else he could be talking to here out in the literal middle of literal nowhere—and a second longer to react. More often than not, the two of you will go days and days without exchanging a single word aloud; you can tell by something inherent and unspoken in the way he holds himself now that tonight is going to be one of those rare nights where he actually talks—not  _ to _ you, maybe, but  _ at _ you, at least, which has to count for something—which in itself is both surprising and vaguely unnerving enough to render you completely immobile for a full five seconds. By the time you snap out of it and make it across the clearing to stand a few feet to his side, he’s tipped his head back up at the sky, jaw set. You’re not sure what to do, not sure what he wants you to do, so you just mimic his stance, following his gaze up to the sky above you. 

It’s always weird, seeing the stars. Houston is too urban, your neighborhood too low-lying and smoggy for you to ever see anything other than passing planes and the occasional satellite whenever you look out your window at night, so seeing the entire galaxy laid bare right before your very eyes drives a funny feeling down the center of your chest. 

Your eyes find a familiar cluster, one you remember seeing printed out all over those kiddie astronomy books you used to be obsessed with when you were in preschool and shit—Big Dipper. 

“You know,” Bro says, and you have to fight back a start. He’s not talking loudly, but there’s something about the note to his voice that always makes it ear-splitting, just like the sigh from earlier. “My old man used to tell me that when people died, they went up there.” He points up to the sky. The moonlight reflects off the leather of his gloves, a dull gray sheen. “Became stars. Told me that’s why there’s so fuckin’ many of them.”

The pricking at the base of your neck kicks up a notch. You rub at it for a second, frowning.

“Whatcha think about that, little man?” Bro tips his head in your direction, which you figure is the closest he’s going to get to looking directly at you. “Seem right to you?”

You open your mouth, furiously willing some sort of response that won’t get your ass handed to you to fall from your lips, but Bro just heaves another sigh, gaze still trained upwards, and you realize he’s not really looking for any sort of contribution from you here.

You’re not sure how that makes you feel. You’re not sure if you want to figure out the answer, either. 

“‘S’a load of horseshit,” he says, the corner of his mouth twisting just a little. “You die, you die. You get buried six feet under and stay there until the worms start eating you. There ain’t a goddamn thing about it that’s poetic. All that shit?” Another sweeping gesture up at the sky. The urge to back away surges up in your chest, and it takes you a second to wrangle it back under control.  _ Don’t be an idiot. _ “Just gas and rocks. Nothing special.”

You hum in affirmation. Bro drops his hand, stuffing it into his pocket. 

“The stars don’t give a fuck about you,” he says. “They didn’t give a fuck about my old man, they didn’t give a fuck about me, and I’ll bet you anything under the goddamn sun they won’t give a fuck about you.” He gives a short, sharp snort, a noise that splits through your chest like a lightning bolt. “They’re fuckin’ gas and rocks, little man. They couldn’t give a shit about you if you tried.” 

You nod. It feels like the right thing to do here. 

It feels like the only thing to do here, maybe.

“One day you’re gonna get it.” Bro tips his head up at the sky again. You watch the muscles in his neck and shoulders flex with practiced ease, run an instinctive series of calculations pertaining to the distance between his elbow and your face and the rocky soil around you in the back of your head before realizing he’s talking to you again. No, scratch that:  _ at _ you, not  _ to _ you. The difference has always been crucial. “Ain’t nothin’ or no one on this earth who gives a fuck about you, little man, not really. Not the stars in the sky or the people in your life or the roof over your motherfuckin’ head. All of that shit is there cause it has to be. The second there’s an out, you best fuckin’ believe everything’s gonna take it. And you’re gonna be the only one you got left at the end of it all.”

You nod again, the motion fractionally more challenging to execute than the last time. Fucked if you know why.

“You’re the only one you can rely on,” he continues. “The only thing out there you’re ever gonna have is yourself.”

It’s interesting, really, how well he’s able to splice advice and orders, merging them together so seamlessly that you stand there dead silent for half a second, totally unable to tell what response he’s looking for: a grunt of acknowledgment, a solemn promise, something entirely different. If nothing else the vagueness keeps you on your toes, and you sometimes get the feeling that’s not exactly an unintentional move on his part.

Which, you know, of fucking course it isn’t. Bro doesn’t deal with lack of intention. Everything he does has a reason, an M.O., some painfully elaborate explanation he never bothers to articulate to you. The day he does something just for the hell of it might as well be the day the stars in the sky really do start giving a fuck as to what happens to you down here on Earth.

“Got it?”

Bro’s voice snaps over your head like a whip. Out of instinct, you nod again, and though it’s a piss-poor response by anyone’s standards, the man beside you just grunts, folding his arms across his chest. 

You risk a side-eye in his general direction. Bright as the moonlight is, Bro’s face is drenched in shadow, a weird mix of dark blues and blacks, shallow cheekbones and empty eye sockets like something straight out of those shitty horror RPGs Rose will sometimes try to get you to play with her. You can make out his expression though as clearly as if someone was shining a torch on him—something in your head mutters  _ learning through failure  _ and you kick it aside with relish: one of thinly suppressed disgust. 

“Got it,” you say. Your voice comes out a lot smaller than you’d ever like to admit.

“My dad was a pussy,” Bro says, and now the revulsion is pronounced, a sneer cracking his face open in two. “Didn’t know the first fuckin’ thing about anything. Spent half my life off his ass banging on about the cosmos and the other half dead as a fuckin’ doornail. And you wanna know what?”

The side of your face sears where you feel his gaze flick over towards you for a split second. “What?” 

“When he kicked it, he didn’t end up there.” He huffs once, short and sharp, the sound shooting straight down your spine. Even the stars themselves seem to edge back a little as waves his hand up in their direction. “Wasted his whole fuckin’ life looking up only to end up in the ground like every other sorry motherfucker out there.”

He leans forward, bends at the waist a little, and spits on the dirt in front of you. “Pussy.”

You get the strangest feeling that suddenly he isn’t talking at the memory of his dad anymore, and your stomach roils. 

Then he turns to you, claps a hand down on your shoulder. Your heart calcifies in your chest in an instant as his fingers curl around your shoulder, digging into the ridge of your shoulder blade through your hoodie. You breathe out through your mouth as quietly as you can as he stands there, staring down at you, face wiped blank.

“Don’t ever let me catch you sayin’ stuff like that, okay, little man?” he says. “I mean it. I ever hear some jumped-up shit like that coming outta your mouth and it’s over for your ass.”

“Yeah.” You nod. “Yeah, dude. Course.”

“I fuckin’ mean it.”

“I know.” The urge to shrug his hand off is so strong it makes your chest ache. “I know.”

“You ain’t going anywhere after you die. You ain’t special.” The grip on your shoulder tightens fractionally. “Don’t let yourself get any big ideas with that, alright? This—” He gestures around him, to the desert, the beat-up car, himself. “—this is all you got, little man. This is all there is for you.”

“Yeah.” You duck your head, feeling the crown of your skull start to heat up as his gaze bores into it. “I get it.”

He reaches out, grabs your chin, nails biting into your face. Even with the shades, you can feel the way his gaze goes straight through you like you’re not even there, not really, and it makes your stomach flip over. You’ve made up your mind: you actually like Bro about a billion and twelve times better when he’s the usual silent, impermeable presence drifting around your apartment versus when he’s like this, all foreboding and grim and outright fucking creepy. At least you’re familiar with the first version. That you know how to deal with. 

This, though. The unfamiliarity makes you sick with anticipation. You feel like you’re bracing for a car crash as the seconds of this interaction drag on so much you can practically see them unraveling at your feet. Part of you can’t help but wish that whoever is driving the fucking thing—knowing your luck, it’s probably Bro—would just hurry up and veer it off the side of the road already. 

“This is all you got,” Bro repeats. “If there’s anythin’ I’ve taught you, anythin’ you’re gonna fuckin’ learn from me, I hope it’s that shit. Else we gonna have a real fuckin’ problem on our hands, huh?”

And then he drops your face, which is a good thing for no reason other than the fact that it saves you from having to scrape together an adequate response to him, whatever the fuck that would be. You seize the opportunity to finally take a few steps back from him—he gives you a look that feels scathing through the shades, and the word  _ pussy  _ echoes around your head for a second. It’s in his voice, raspy and rough and flat with some ineffable sort of disappointment, and isn’t that just the funniest fucking thing ever?

“I’ve been tryin’ my fuckin’ hardest with you,” he says. “I really have. But sometimes I don’t think you’re catchin’ my drift. Sometimes I don’t think you understand.”

Dimly aware of the fact that you’ve just fallen ass-backward into the conversational equivalent of a literal minefield, all you’re able to do is stand there, dust blowing around your ankles, palms pressed flat against the sides of your legs as Bro considers you from where he stands, mouth working itself into a hard line.

A disappointed line, really, and somehow that hurts more than any other thing he could do to you right now.

“Do you?” he asks. If you were an idiot, you’d almost be tempted to call that concern undercutting his tone for a second. “Do you understand, Dave?”

The  _ Dave  _ hits like a punch to the face. You’re never  _ Dave  _ to him. You’re  _ little man,  _ sometimes  _ little bro  _ if he’s feeling particularly colloquial or particularly mocking or some particularly shitty combination of the two. Sometimes you aren’t even anything—he’s nonverbal by nature, preferring to communicate what he wants to you through near-invisible twitches of his head and inscrutable facial expressions—but you are never, ever  _ Dave,  _ and the fact that you are now makes your whole body go cold.

Which is stupid. Of course it’s stupid. But still.

It takes you a second to realize you’ve been holding your breath, and when you try and force it out, part of it catches in the back of your throat. Fucking wonderful.

“I understand,” you say, voice flat as possible.

His expression hardens. Significantly _. _

“Bro.”

It sounds like too much a plea on your end for the way his hand twitches at his side to be totally unintentional, but he doesn’t so much as take a breath in your direction. With the weird feeling that you’ve just dodged a bullet right between the eyes, you exhale forcefully again and rub at your jaw with your knuckles for a second. He just gives you a look that's both inscrutable and painfully familiar at the same time, and just like that, the scene is over. 

“Car,” he says, stepping back, already turning to the driver’s side. “Now.”

Above you, Big Dipper looks down, tiny white flecks amidst a sea that looks just like them. Those stars watched you come into this life, and you have the distinct feeling they’ll watch you go out of it, too. There’s something there, some symbolic gravitas that’s just slipping between your fingers, but like Bro said, there really isn’t anything poetic about this, no matter what way you look at it.

_ Do you understand, Dave? _

You turn on your heel and follow him to the car. You don’t bother to spare the sky a second glance.

***

“Okay, okay, that one right there, that’s Ursa Major.”

“What one?”

“That one. Look. Right— look.”

“That’s a tree. You’re pointing at a tree right now.”

“I’m literally— _ dude. _ Follow my finger. Look where I’m pointing.”

“I am looking where you’re pointing. You’re pointing at a fucking tree.” 

“Okay, first of all, the thing you think I’m pointing at is literally a rock.”

“No—  _ no.” _ With a huff of biblical proportions, Karkat flips onto his side, propping his head up on the hell of his hand so he can glare at you. At least you think he’s glaring. It’s a little hard to see in the gloom. The long-suffering air to his tone is unmistakable, though, adequate lighting or not. “We had this conversation forty minutes ago because you kept saying you could see Jupiter and I kept saying one, we’re not going to be in the right position to see Jupiter for another five months and two, that's not even the sky you're pointing at right now and you were all like  _ no, no Karkat you’re so blind, you just can't see the stars because it’s really dark over there _ —by the way, did I tell you how that makes genuinely no fucking sense? Because that’s definitely something I think you need to be made aware of—and then you made me turn on my flashlight because you thought it was going to prove me wrong but then we found out you had in fact been pointing at a tree that entire time and you're literally doing the exact same thing now because you’re pointing in the same fucking direction, Dave, and—hold on.” He breaks off, closing his mouth with a snap ad shifting a little closer to you. “Are you fucking laughing at me right now?”

You are laughing at him right now. In your defense, you’re only doing so a little bit. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, though. “Not at all, dude.”

“I can literally fucking hear you laughing right now. As we speak.”

“Wow.” You clutch at the collar of your shirt, splaying your fingers across your chest. “I’m hurt, dude. Can’t even take me at my word now? Is there no trust? Is there no communication?” You stretch out, dropping your arm into Karkat's face, reaching a hand up to tousle his hair. “Is there no—”

“Oh my god.” He swats your hand away, reaching across the space between the two of you to flick your ear. “Stop. I’m begging you.”

“I’m lamenting,” you inform him, going to flick him back. He jerks his head out of the way just in time; you settle dropping your hand in his hair again and ruffling it some more. This time he doesn’t move his head away. “Don’t interrupt me. It’s not healthy for the grieving process.”

“You’re insufferable,” Karkat says, and even though you can’t see it properly, you just know he’s rolling his eyes at you right now. You can practically hear it in his voice. 

“You’re just jealous I was able to find Ursa Major before you were.”

“How many times do we have to go over this? You literally—”

“Blah, blah, blah.” You wave your hand in front of his face. “Semantics, dude.”

“Yeah.” You feel him relax fractionally through the loose grip you still have on the top of his head, a silent telltale he’s either conceding defeat in this particular roundabout bit of bickering or just can’t be bothered to argue his case anymore—the latter, if you know anything about him, which you do. 

At any rate, you’re sort of glad for the break in the conversation. Not that you don’t like talking to him—you do, way more than you’d ever give him the satisfaction of admitting—just that there’s something about being back here for the first time in so long that needs your full attention in order to be processed—zipped lips and all. Shit, how long  _ has  _ it been, really? Definitely before the game—as weirdly not-busy as you find yourself more often than not nowadays, there’s still plenty of shit for you to get up to within the confines of your own home, at least enough to make trips like this a little hard to come by sometimes. 

And if it wasn’t after the game, then it was irrefutably before. Which means it was with Bro.

Perfect. Totally awesome. Because it’s not like you haven't gotten enough of that guy as it is. Fucking perfect.

You manage to bite back the grimace that inevitably comes rushing to your face, but the tension that always accompanies the ceremonious crashing of your train of thought headlong into Bro Central is unavoidable. You’d like to think you’ve gotten pretty good at holding it back, but clearly not good enough, because after a second, Karkat shifts a little under your palm and you realize he’s turned to look at you. You flick your gaze down to meet his; in the darkness, his eyes shine like a pair of searchlights, pinning you down. 

And at once you know he knows something’s up. Great.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi.”

“What’s up?” 

You pause for a second, deliberating on your answer. The look Karkat gives you is careful enough to almost come across as casual, but your better instinct tells you otherwise. As painfully blunt as he can be with stuff sometimes, you’ve never known the troll to operate from a place of anything other than deliberate intention. He does what he means and he means it with every fiber of his being. It’s one of the things you admire the most about him—you, with your lifetime of painful fronting and off-beat irony and fumbling grasp on anything remotely pertaining to sincerity. 

It’s also scary. Scary in ways you don’t totally know how to parse a lot of the time.

You swallow. “The sky.”

“Funny.” The darkness does nothing to flatten out the histrionic levels of dry amusement that flood off of his voice in waves. “That’s, like, the sixth time you’ve made that joke in response to me asking you that question.”

You shrug. “It’s a fan favorite.”

“What, am I the fan here?”

“Aren’t you?” You flash him a grin. “C’mon, you totally are. I mean, we both know you’re basically obsessed with me. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had, like, set up one of those poster shrines for me in the back of our closet, or something. You know, with all those low-quality magazine cut-outs and Jesus candles, and shit.”

The dry amusement, if possible, sharpens. “Why the fuck would I have a Jesus candle in my closet-shrine to you, can I ask?”

You roll onto your side to face Karkat, pillowing your head on your arm, and grin at him some more. “Better question: is this your way of admitting the shrine is a thing?”

“No, this is not my way of me admitting the shrine is a thing,  _ moron.” _ He sniffs. “Also, nice deflecting.”

Something inside you stills a little. 

“No clue what you’re talking about, man.”

Karkat sniffs again. You half-consider cracking a joke about how if he’s coming down with something you’re going to make him sleep on the couch for a second before figuring that now might not be the most opportune moments to advance that particular line of comedy. Karkat so rarely looks at you like that—with complete, unfettered seriousness—that him doing so now kind of stops all alternate trains of thought in their tracks, never mind allows them to advance far enough to get any words out of your mouth.

You roll onto your back again, staring up at the sky. The smattering of stars visible between the gaps in the trees surrounding you look sort of like the freckles Karkat gets in the summer after he spends enough time in the sun. You open your mouth to tell him this; what comes out is just a little bit different than intended.

“The last time I came out here was with my Bro.”

Okay, a lot different. 

Beside you, Karkat falls still. You recognize this as your official unofficial cue to keep talking, and for some reason it makes your stomach harden a little. It’s not like this is anything  _ new,  _ really—by now, the number of conversations you’ve had with Karkat about this aren’t exactly in the single digits. Okay, so conversations might be a bit of a generous descriptor there—for the first year and a half straight of being friends, the only times you addressed the topic of Bro when talking to Karkat were unavoidable slip-ups that happened while you were trying to explain some long-gone tidbit about the human experience to him that always left the troll with a deeply unsettled expression scrawled across his face—but still. You’ve talked about this. He knows all the cute anecdotes and the time-tested recollections and the gory details—literally—that you could bring yourself to talk about—that you could remember in the first place, and aren’t those the same thing, really? You’d like to think you’re past the point of beating around the bush with him on stuff like this—at the very least, you’d like to think your days of blue-balling him with vague nods towards your laughably screwed up upbringing that never go anywhere are behind you. 

And they are. Really, they are. It’s just that you’re sick of this, sort of. It’s been years, enough to forget the exact color your bedroom was painted and Bro’s favorite cereal and the exact feeling of your back colliding with a flight of stairs; a part of you can’t help but wonder why, then, with the edges Housten already so blurry in the back of your head, this is still something you cling onto. A part of you can’t help but wonder why it feels like no matter what direction you walk in, all roads lead back to a faded polo shirt and a pair of busted up shades.

And if you’re sick of it, you can’t even imagine how Karkat is feeling about the whole thing.

“Dude,” the troll says, forever on cue. “I can literally hear you thinking yourself into a hysterical frenzy over there.”

“I’m not hysterical,” you mutter.

“Not yet.” And then he rolls onto his side, folding his hands under his head and pulling his knees to his chest as he watches you. It feels sort of like you two are a couple of middle schoolers at a sleepover, swapping secrets and crushes and classroom drama, and it takes you a second to remember you’re never actually going to have a clue what that feels like. Your stomach twists. “Give it two seconds.”

“You know me.” Your hand feels a little slow as you bring it up to the side of your head to rap your knuckles against your temple, but you can still move, so you suppose that counts as a win in someone’s book. “Nothing if not Earth C’s best and most skilled and talented thinker.”

Karkat’s laugh is a little tired, but nowhere near the territory of frustration. You sometimes wonder how he does it, before remembering that’s not a question you really want answered most of the time. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

You give it a second before answering. “We always talk about it.”

“We do not  _ always talk about it.”  _ You can feel the look he gives you even through the darkness. “And even if we do, I don’t care.”

“Don’t you get sick of it?”

He gives you a look of confusion that’s so genuine it makes you feel it hit somewhere in the out of your stomach. “Sick of what?”

“You know.” You force yourself to meet his gaze for a second in the hopes you’ll see somewhere it that he does, in fact, know. Helpfully enough, nothing in his eyes registers as anything near that sort of understanding. Fuck. Guess you’re going to have to lay this all out, then. “Me. Well—” Karkat’s expression flits into much darker waters and you backtrack at a breakneck pace. “—not, like,  _ me  _ me, but—you know. All my Bro shit, I guess.”

“I get sick of a lot of shit,” he says. There’s a funny note to his voice now, some sort of tension you can’t really wrap your head around. “Movies. Foods. Half of our friends.” He blinks. “Kidding on that last part. But your ‘bro shit’—” There’s a certain amount of viciousness to the movement; somehow, though, you get the impression that it isn’t directed at you. “—as you put it? That’s not something I could get sick of even if I tried.”

“But it sucks,” you say, even as you get a distinct feeling that this is rapidly becoming a losing battle.

“Yeah. It undeniably fucking does.” Karkat shifts, spreading his hands out in front of him as much as he can. “So. Lay it on me.” 

You nod. The gesture feels disconnected, somehow. This is nothing new, nothing new you’re telling him, certainly nothing new you’re thinking about, and yet every time the topic resurfaces, it very much feels like it is. New in the way that makes you not want to touch it even with a fifty-foot pole. 

And yet. 

“It wasn’t a ritual, or anything,” you say—hear yourself say, really. “Coming out here, I mean. I wasn’t really allowed out of the house most of the time and he didn’t drive much anyway. His work was at home, so, you know.” You blink back the image of the steady red pulse of a camera light glaring down at you from the bathroom ceiling and swallow. “Nowhere to go, really. But he’d get bored sometimes, I guess, or he wanted to fuck with me in a new way, so sometimes he’d just show up at my door all freaky-like and be all like,  _ hey, little man, wanna go to the desert for a bit?  _ and I’d be all like,  _ uh, not really, but not like I can say that out loud, so sure,  _ you know.”

Beside you, Karkat nods. His eyes haven’t left your face, and as stressful as it is, the way he looks at you like he can read each individual thought passing through your head, it’s his unwavering gaze that keeps you talking.

“But we did it sometimes. Usually, he’d just drive us up there and we’d fuck around for a bit—he’d go for a walk while I stayed in the car, or we’d just, like, sit around and listen to his shitty mixtapes in silence.” You swallow again. “I think he kinda hated it, in a way. He’d always bitch about how stupid coming out here was and how pointless leaving the house is and—you know.”  _ Do you understand? Do you understand, Dave?  _ “The usual shit. But it was our thing, kind of. The nice one of our things, at least.”

Karkat nods again. You pick at a half-healed scratch to the back of your hand, a product of a slip-up during training earlier this week—what a world in which you can actually make mistakes during training without getting your ass served to you six different ways on a silver platter; what a fucking world—for a second before continuing.

“It always feels weird, you know?” You hold your hand out in front of your face and study the scratch for a second, blocking out the light from the stars. “Like—coming back to this shit. The stuff I use to do with him. I sure as hell don’t want the memory of my long-dead dead pseudo-brother to fuck up my experience with doing things I like doing with the people I like doing them with, but—”

“It’s weird,” Karkat finishes simply. “Going back to it and having everything about him still, like, I don’t know. Attached to it.”

You nod, humming under your breath. “Yeah. And I don’t wanna give him more power than necessary because god knows he already had enough of that shit under his belt when he was alive and kicking. So it always feels kinda dumb to, like, admit to that, I guess? That it’s still hard to look an Xbox in the face or train during the summer or even be in the same room as my mixing board, or something.” You breathe out carefully, the noise whistling between your teeth. “Like, man, I don’t know. It feels so lame that I’m still letting him fuck with my head after all this time, in a way.”

“I don’t think it’s lame,” Karkat says, just as carefully. “I think it makes sense, really. To feel that way, I mean.”

“But it’s been years since he kicked it.”

“And it was even longer that you were living with him when he very much had not kicked it.” He flashes you another look—one of the Karkat Vantas Patent-Pending ones that drills straight through you like a laser pointer. “There’s bound to be repercussions to all the fucked-up shit he put you through. That’s not to, like, freak you out, or whatever, just—” He breaks off, sighs. “It’s one thing, you know, to try and unpack this shit while you’re stuck on a meteor with a bunch of trolls you’ve never met before hurtling while Rose fucking Lalonde wanders the halls nose-deep in some incomprehensible Eldrich tome that’s confirming all the fun and colorful ways we’re all going to get brutally fucking eviscerated as soon as we reach our destination. It’s another to do it here and now without the imminent threat of death hanging over your head.” He sighs again, pressing his chin into the crook of his elbow as he looks up at you some more. “It makes it more real, being out of the woods and all.”

When he says it like that, it almost makes sense. Fuck him.

“I think it’s also, like—” You make a vague swirling motion with your hands, as if the gesture can somehow conjure up the right word from thin air and drop them into your mouth. “I don’t know. A lot of shit didn’t feel real on the meteor. Like I know it  _ was  _ real, duh, but, like—man, it’s hard to take fucking  _ anything _ seriously when you’re literally hurtling through the depths of a parallel universe you and your thirteen-year-old friends created while speedrunning some apocalypse-causing RPG game, much less—you know. All the shit he did.”

Karkat nods, slowly, blinking once. 

“I don’t think I was, like, gunning for my own death or anything,” you say, “but at the same time, it was hard to imagine anything else happening at times. And made it feel like, you know, what’s the point in getting into all of that?” Another inarticulate hand wave. You’re almost starting to get good at this. “This shit already sucks so much for totally external reasons; why bother making it worse for myself by, like, locking myself in my bedroom and thinking about all the ways my bro used to beat my ass into the concrete, or something? That would’ve just made me miserable.”

_ More miserable, _ your brain offers up, but you push it aside. That stuff doesn’t really matter anymore and, more to the point, it doesn’t help to come back to. 

Instead, you keep talking. “But now, you know, like you said, we’re outta the woods and shit, and there’s just so much more space for everything to come creeping back in, in a way.” You swallow. It doesn’t hurt as much as it might’ve in the past. Maybe that’s growing. “And that’s where I start feeling, you know, stupid as all fuck.”

Or maybe it’s just all in your head. One of the two.

“It’s not stupid,” Karkat says, his tone the exact sort of patient that makes you simultaneously want to put a solid fifty feet of distance between the two of you and bury your face in his sweater. You concentrate on remaining as stock-still as humanly possible as a nice middle ground. “It—Dave.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look at me.”

With a frighteningly tangible amount of effort—yeah, no, definitely just in your head—you turn your neck and meet his gaze. It’s a lot harder than you’d like to admit, but you do it. You do it all the same.

“This isn’t stupid,” he says slowly, enunciating every word with a sort of deliberation you need to start associating with him and him alone. “Yeah? You still dealing with the effects of everything isn’t stupid.”

“Shouldn’t I be over it by now?” It’s a genuine question, but the whiney-ness of it makes you want to crawl out your skin nevertheless. “I mean—” You break off to laugh, the sound grating against the back of your throat. “—man, this is fucking  _ star-gazing _ . I can’t even go star-gazing with my fucking boyfriend without turning it into some sort of depressing bitchfest about my clinically deranged older brother. It’s—”

“Swear to god, if the next words out of your mouth are any iteration of  _ lame as hell,  _ I’m going to fucking eviscerate you with a blunt spoon.”

You close your mouth with a snap.

“Kidding,” he says, mouth twisting into a funny little lopsided grin. “Duh. But, no, seriously. Like—we all went through shit, right? That’s not to play the trauma Olympics, or anything, because fuck that noise, but it’s to say that I—” His smile flips over into a tight frown. Suddenly it’s his turn to fix his gaze up towards the sky. “—I get it, yeah? I’m not talking out of my ass here, or something. I get it. I get how hard working through this stuff is, and I get how shitty having to confront it, like, what feels like every fucking second of the day is, and I get that it can make you feel stupid a lot of the time, or whatever. I really fucking get that. But there isn’t an expiry date on all this, you know?” Gaze still on the stars, he reaches out and bumps his knee against yours. “There isn’t some deadline for working through all your batshit childhood trauma. It’s okay to be where you are and still get fucked up over stuff sometimes. It doesn’t make you weak or lame or anything like that, okay?” 

He rolls onto his elbows, propping himself up so he can stare down at you. You focus on the way the edges of his hair are just starting to fall into his eyes and long-since-healed nicks to his cheeks and jaw you can see through the gloom and the faint flecks of brown spiraling around his pupils like satellites and not on the strange, building pressure in the center of your chest. Not at all on that. No way.

“It sounds like you’ve been reading one of June’s self-help books again,” you say after a second, mostly just because you’re pretty certain that if you say anything else, you’re going to end up crying. 

“Maybe I have,” he says, a little haughty, but still doesn’t drop the intensity in his gaze. “I’m serious, though.”

“I know.”

“Dead serious. And I’m going to keep saying it until you believe me.”

You swallow around what feels like a mouthful of ash. “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

“I want to.” He blinks down at you. There’s something in his eyes you can’t quite place, some intangible sheen over them that makes your heart do flip-flops in your stomach. There’s a word for it, you know there is, but then he’s talking again, so it doesn’t really matter. “I want to, Dave.”

And there it is. You wait for the familiar pain that comes along with the  _ Dave _ , with the name in the desert while the stars look down on you— _ this is all you got, little man,  _ a voice in your head says with a perfectly-polished sneer,  _ this is all you fuckin’ got— _ because that’s how it goes, and sometimes you think that’s how it’s always going to go.

It doesn’t come, though. When the anticipation passes, Karkat is still there, blinking down at you, his gaze expectant in a way that demands absolutely nothing from you. Above you, a satellite drifts across the sky, blinking offbeat like a defective shooting star. 

The backs of your eyes prickle for a second. You blink it back with as much determination as you can.

“Okay,” you say, and to your credit, your voice comes out a lot steadier than you expected. Small mercies. “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You reach up, swipe at the underside of your eyes with the heel of your hand because—desert air. Something like that. “Yeah, I—thanks.”

“You don’t have to thank me, idiot.” With that, he flops back down to the ground, this time significantly closer to you than he was before he got up. You pretend like this doesn’t make your heart drop to your knees like some schoolkid with a crush. 

You don’t know what that feels like, either, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s not too late to learn, or something equally nauseatingly trite like that. Whatever. It’s Karkat. You’re cool to let some platitudes slide sometimes.

“Which one’s that one?” the troll in question asks, his head now most definitely on your shoulder, breath tickling the underside of your chin. With one finger he points straight up to a selection of stars you recognize so fast they might as well be burned onto the insides of your eyelids.

Maybe Bro was right, really. Maybe this is all you’ll ever have.

You're starting to think that doesn’t sound like too bad of a deal from where you’re standing, though.

“Big Dipper,” you say aloud. 

Karkat nods, hair brushing against the side of your face. In one, clean gesture, he reaches out, his fingers wrapping around your own seamlessly. 

“Thanks,” you say again. It doesn’t even come close to encompassing what you really want to say. You’re not even sure if you could put that shit to coherent language even if you broke your back trying. “Thank you.”

But he’s Karkat, so he gets it. He always does, and that’s the new thing to mitigate—the bittersweet twinge that accompanies that realization every time you have it: the fact that he gets this, too. For better or worse—and sometimes you’re inclined to go with worse here because, really, this isn’t something you’d wish on anyone, let alone Karkat, even on the best of days—he gets it.

But right now, you’re okay to put that on the back burner and just sit here, tracing the constellations above you with your eyes, the patterns as familiar as the last day you set foot out here—a lifetime ago now, literally and figuratively and emotionally and everything in between—in a peaceful silence. Beside you, Karkat’s grip tightens on your hand by a fraction and, after a second, you squeeze back.


End file.
